Starting out in Rocket League

Hi all, my name's Nellie and I've been playing Rocket League for about three years now.

I started playing on the Nintendo Switch in September during the 2020 pandemic. Rocket League had just turned free-to-play (F2P) making it more accessible to everyone. I commonly saw Rocket League clips throughout the years since it released and it always looked very interesting to me. However, it being $25 and exclusive to consoles that I did not own made it difficult to get into.

My first few months of playing Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch were needless to say, extremely fun. The pandemic and online zoom meetings meant a lot of time to play car soccer... A LOT of time.

Thanks to the Switch's save clip feature, I have tons of clips of me scoring low skill
goals, such as this one.

And this one. I remember being absolutely gobsmacked when I scored this.

One of the best things about Rocket League I find is looking back on old clips and laughing at the simple things you did, but at the the time thought was amazing.

Another great thing about Rocket League is looking at all the low rank shenanigans. One of my favorite clips from 2020. I still don't understand how the guy missed the ball. He was on target too and then just turned away from it... faking?

For the majority of my early playtime, I played only casually, but slowly got sucked into the competitive scene. During the start of 2021, I started putting a little more effort into getting better and managed to achieve Platinum 1, Rocket League's most average rank. For a while, I'll stay in Platinum rank for a few months. 

The third thing that I like the most about Rocket League is the rank progression. I have played other "competitive" games before and they usually hand out rank-ups like candy. Many of them, to start, do not allow you to drop out of a rank once you reach it. In addition, penalties for losing is much more lenient, while winning grants you many points towards your next rank up. What happens is even if you are not that good, you will rank up due to the game design, and not necessarily because you earned it through hard work and improvement. Rocket League's rank system is genuine in that you one: you can drop out of ranks, and can even drop multiple ranks if you are not playing your best. And two, you gain and lose the same amount of points. This means if you play six games, and only win and lose three, you will remain roughly the same rank, whereas in other certain games, breaking even will in fact push you upwards. Rocket League does not care about your ego, and I appreciate that.

Now that I'm starting to get a little more serious on ranking up, I start heading into Rocket League's training mode and start practicing more intermediate mechanics, such as aerials, and learning how to dribble.

In March 2021, I "upgraded" from playing on my Nintendo Switch to playing on my laptop. And that laptop being a Microsoft Surface Pro 6. Not exactly a machine to play video games on. Paired with that laptop, was a half decade old PlayStation 3 controller. Looking back at it, it was pretty bad. Because a Surface Pro isn't meant for gaming, I had to play at a ridiculously low resolution, with the lowest graphics and rendering quality possible. And even then, if I wanted to play a 3s lobby, my computer would still struggle with keeping up with the fast paced action going on. Just to give an example of how bad my settings were, here is a clip of me scoring a pretty okay flick.

I would sometimes struggle bad as cars that were further away from just tiny little pixels, and forget about reading the ball. I'm honestly not sure how I played like that for so long.

The great thing about switching to a laptop though was I finally had access to Rocket League's holy grail for training: Workshop Maps. This meant I could focus on my aerial and dribbling mechanics with the Dribble Challenge #2 map and numerous rings map, which is exactly what I did. A majority of my time in Rocket League would now be dedicated to beating my completion time in these maps.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading and check back next week to see more of my Rocket League progression and guidance on how to play better and what to expect when playing this game. See you soon.